


sundays seem endless space

by feltstrips



Category: Before The Storm (Video Game), Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Drug Use, F/F, F/M, Mild Gore, Prose Poem, Teenage Melodrama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-13 17:36:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13575576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feltstrips/pseuds/feltstrips
Summary: all your romance died with your father.





	sundays seem endless space

**Author's Note:**

> theres a lot of the pronoun game being played here man

1  
That old dog  
from down the road;  
she's still alive, cancer-swollen shoulder  
carried along with the rest of her  
trotting to cross the street.  
Outdoors, watch her,  
save thoughts of when you saw her younger than today.

2  
The frost spikes your damp hair into cerulean ice.  
It's cold, too cold for pajamas  
and curling into a blanket your dead grandmother made,  
toes tucked against the chill metal of your truck's bed,  
but just cold enough for you  
trying to pull away from your mother's sobs.

3  
Parents stay in their bedroom,  
bathroom,  
but the house floods anyway,  
undertow and surface tension two layers.  
His voice is an exasperated riptide,  
he can see only himself when there are tears.

4  
This is well known to you.  
A year ago  
(maybe two, actually, or three, you'd stopped counting after enough other days),  
he'd done it for nearly the first time.  
At the stairs, all balled up  
you scratched the underside of your soft arms in a panic  
until they leaked plasma,  
ripped like mosquito bites.  
He watched, pretending not to notice,  
corrective sermon unceasing.  
A pledge of allegiance to your stepdad,  
because he knows everything about you. 

5  
A train never stops, his words never stop;  
later, when your nails dug into unmarked flesh, excavating,  
trying blankly to see what would happen if you could really do it,  
(of course you can, there's too much of your real father in you,  
his voice, his pain,)  
you succeeded.  
Numb at the victory, pinkish-clear  
poured out of just another mosquito bite.

5.5  
Oh, sweet thing,  
grit is so tiring,  
sadness weary,  
but all your romanticising is predictable.

6  
Hear them just as easily  
as the rush of shower water  
from a better day,  
or a better time.  
You've probably torn yourself up  
crouched on the floor  
where her feet are right now.

7  
Why? Because.  
Words stick into you,  
pulling flesh up with them until  
reluctantly,  
you are released.  
Words are worse than the ink-covered needle  
pushed into your ankle,  
over and over,  
drawing a rebellion  
shaped like love.  
That pencil, stuck in a jar, was Sappho's inkwell and quill.

8  
Track marks seem to be muddied watercolor, trailing from where arms bend.  
They hurt with the same ache of heartstrings she pulls  
too fast, too hard, and sprains.  
Your paintbrush was a medical syringe,  
stolen not for drugs,  
but for satisfaction,  
and it holds memories of graying carpet  
reflected in glass walls.

9  
How much from your veins  
bled with knife or needle  
is soaked,  
faded, unseen,  
into that floor?  
And how much saltwater  
have you heard fall over the bloodstains,  
invisible ink lining invisible ink?  
Impossible to tell,  
you've never played witness  
to her, only a listener.  
Her tears may not even run,  
only burn the thin skin  
under her eyes  
and leave bubbled welts  
filled with familiar liquid.

10  
But know this;  
no blood could ever be enough.  
Eat your heart out,  
rip your lungs free,  
and you're still starving.  
Look, see?  
Now there's a hole in your chest to match the pit of your stomach.

11  
Your thumbs settle on the page,  
joints stiff with cold, hovering over the words given life by  
blaming her  
blaming him  
and painting portraits of a victim.  
Who's portrait?  
Can't tell, the acrylic has slid down off the canvas  
and pooled in the cracks under your fingernails.  
Grab a knife, scrape it off,  
begin somewhere else.  
Ain't no victims, not here.  
But being fifteen tastes like India ink,  
hand sanitizer for too-deep wounds,  
wanton needing, and true blue hair dye.

12  
Say you don't care about your family,  
you care for the impossible,  
the long-gone,  
and just what they asked against.  
Ruined, but that boy is around, still selling.  
Praying in curses really fucked you over this time.

The father, son and holy spirit all ignore your acidic oaths,  
leave you stewing,  
handprints bruised beneath the skin  
in a shade of ultraviolet not on any spectrum.  
Hope is worthless, but still, you hope for his brain to be  
marked just as irreversibly as your body.  
You hate to kiss now, so thanks for nothing, God.

You won't want for pity. You wish instead for a sated soul, gorged to bursting on  
revenge served cold.

13  
That mother of yours, how you love her.  
But it's strange when she seems not to think of impact,  
just moves, repeats, corrects,  
and leaves herself shaking with rage.  
Echos have grown solid,  
and the cacophony bounces off whitewashed walls.

She talks like she loves him,  
you listen, tired, knowing he says she  
hung the stars in the sky  
and you're pulling them down.

14  
That replacement of hers, isn't he just so right?  
just so sure,  
just so unstoppable.  
He wants that adoration, but  
everyone’s unmovable,  
turning deaf-numb  
while he preaches himself raw.

Do better,  
you owe me,  
owe us.  
It's hard to agree when you're the issue to fix.

15  
Maybe you were raised by a broken record,  
one disk, two albums,  
double sided;  
the label is scratches  
and nothing more.  
If it was legible,  
the title inscribed  
would probably read  
“Caring too much”.

16  
A beat,  
heartbeat, drumbeat,  
cue to be desperate.  
Still driver of this car, yet not enough, far from satisfactory,  
because they offer such panoptic commodities.

A beat,  
same heartbeat,  
same drumbeat,  
and that's cue to hate it all.  
Try to wait until summer for suicide,  
'cause those headlights aren't white enough, they'll drown in the snow.

A beat,  
empty heartbeat,  
worn drumbeat,  
not your cue, so it all hates you in equilibrium.  
The side door opens,  
shoes stomp concrete,  
and they're angry,  
spitting a claim on your confession.  
You're the one who stood in the road.

The record skips  
and plays from the start.

17  
Birds don't mind you, freezing castaway,  
misusing concepts of suffering,  
your blanket woven from hyperbole.  
To the birds, you're a showpiece,  
with blue on  
white on  
pink on  
red  
covering symbols you know you'll regret.

Your hair looks like bright feathers,  
so titmice  
stare from the abor.  
They say, whispering amongst themselves,  
That's a bluejay!  
Is she stranded on the ground,  
wrapped in false wings?  
Oh, what a sad thing.

You're fascinating  
until you move to gaze back  
and become dangerous.  
Hearing them take guilty flight is too much,  
so you uncurl  
and migrate back indoors.

18  
Your home country,  
couch, riverbed  
of silt sucking you down, making you  
sedimentary.  
It’s warm, friction from decomposing matter  
burning better than a hot water bottle.  
Years will pass  
and see this here;  
a fossil, unless you get bored first.

19  
The water rushing from the bathroom is frozen now;  
voices paused,  
a creek in January  
waiting for the next hot day  
to set sheet ice boiling.  
In the quiet, without excuses to run,  
thoughts ferment.

You feel as if you want to puke, fade,  
do the worst drugs  
so that you'll be what you envy  
and everyone else hates.  
Not yet, however;  
You’ve things to wait for.  
A girl, an endless road, and  
a motel room  
dripping with neon lights.

20  
Please think again  
of young dog days.  
When a mockingbird, destined for a shoebox,  
is scraped from concrete by a shovel  
in your child-small hands.  
The girl you've made your other half sniffles by your side,  
brown hair tangled and worn.

Feathers kiss against scrapes,  
sting with delicacy.  
Oh, what a lovely thing,  
broken by force fields and the rasp of metal on grit.  
It needs to heal;  
so a tea towel, wrapped,  
holds it down  
cages it  
in that dark box.  
A gift,  
a better hell,  
is more temporary than death.  
It didn't ask for you to,  
but you'll be damned if you miss an opportunity to be kind in that girl's doe-like eyes.

In a day,  
the mockingbird will fly, put you and her,  
devils of happy fortune,  
behind it  
holding up the shoebox.  
You're frowning, disappointed.  
Didn't think to release it from your fingers.

It was not vomited from the maw,  
but escaped instead.  
The nest still rotted.

21  
That was another day,  
and you still rush to windows  
when wings hit the glass.  
To the birds, obstacles are unfathomable,  
until necks break on what you can never warn about.  
Eternally, you come running  
to save, for your amusement, or for  
an extra drip into the reservoir of  
"see, I'm a good person"  
that's kept you alive.

22  
Is there a test today?  
Yeah, and that question  
was your study session.  
Don't worry, multiple choices will  
be the same to you.  
If anything you're a liar,  
if anything you don't care.  
Throw yourself to the birds,  
they're all asking for you  
and won't wait long.

23  
(Or, perhaps,  
you're just a narcissist. Fuck.)

**Author's Note:**

> ill add the italics later


End file.
